The Story of PC Music in 20 Songs

When PC Music first emerged, it sounded like the future—and a decade later, we’re all living in it. Here’s how the London label turned collective has reshaped modern pop—from the Barbie soundtrack to Beyoncé’s RENAISSANCE and beyond.

When a little-known London producer named A. G. Cook started the pcmusic.info website in June 2013, he wasn’t so much trying to start a record label as create a place where the recordings he and his friends had been working on could live. But either way, he started something. Collectively, their music was poppy and cute but also warped and avant-garde. It was DIY yet glossy, with vocals that felt intensely human, even though they were pitched up and run through Auto-Tune. Dig into the PC Music universe and you’ll hear a ton of different sounds: J- and K-pop; Eurodance; trance and happy hardcore; rave in Danny L Harle and Cook; teen pop in GFOTY; glitch and industrial music in SOPHIE, the late, pioneering pop producer and a close associate of Cook’s. It was a lot to take in, as were the levels of irony and self-awareness that PC artists laced through everything they did. Was this a bold new era in pop, or a parody of it? Ten years on, you only have to look at today’s musical landscape to find the answer, with their craft having been embraced by music’s biggest names—from Beyoncé to Dua Lipa and Madonna, artists who’ve harnessed the power of PC Music to bring a touch of the underground to their mainstream pop. But what about the gerbil-like voices of sped-up tracks going viral on TikTok? PC artists got there first. And hyperpop? PC Music effectively invented it, evolving from a simple website into a label and then shorthand for an entire genre in its own right. But as much as they’ve always heralded the future, PC’s work isn’t entirely without precedent. The connective tissue running through it all is the sense of something both sophisticated and complex, but also childlike to the point that it can feel surreal. It’s a contrast you can trace back to the obsessive art-pop of Kate Bush and Scritti Politti. But also to the way an electronic artist like Aphex Twin tweaked the friendliness of ad jingles and video-game music into his own mutant forms. And let’s not forget the ahead-of-their-time processed vocals of Cher’s 1998 Auto-Tuned smash “Believe”, or the megapop innovations of everything from psychedelic-era Beatles to the boy-and-girl-band genius of producers like Max Martin, whom Cook has cited as a key (and perhaps unlikely) influence.

Like everything about the label, PC Music’s name felt super intentional. On the one hand, it sounded as blank and bureaucratic as a shell company. On the other, it was—as the P in PC put it—personal. In 2013, the idea of using computers to make music wasn’t just the province of electronic producers but of anyone who wanted the autonomy of recording from the comfort of their own homes. And the computer, by extension, wasn’t just the thing you did your work on, but the hub of your social network—the place you went for entertainment and connection, the last light on in your room at night. Indeed, it’s perhaps telling that Cook once said that he was the first person SOPHIE had ever allowed to touch SOPHIE’s laptop. But PC Music is also a reflection of the strange, delightful things those laptops could do—stuff that, say, acoustic guitars just couldn’t. PC’s founding members were experimenting in real time—and the simplest way to describe the results is pop pushed to its extreme. Sometimes the vocalists sounded like girls, sometimes they sounded like boys, and sometimes they didn’t sound like either—a sonic queerness that resonated in every squish, zip and beep. Compared to the bass and dubstep that dominated English club music at the time, PC Music sounded naive. Compared to quote-unquote real pop, it sounded amateurish and weird. To anyone who felt excluded by either, it sounded like home. But PC Music also shifted notions of who believed they could make music. Early on, Cook said that he liked recording with people who didn’t normally make music and treating them like they were major-label artists—an image that resonated with everything from Andy Warhol turning non-actors and hanger-outers into self-described superstars to the way punk rock telegraphed the dream that anyone could make art if they tried. Ten years on, it’s an attitude you can still hear in the wave of post-PC artists—a lot of them female, queer and non-binary—making big synth-pop anthems from the cosy confines of their bedrooms.

Even as the backstory behind PC Music came into focus over time, the boundaries of the project seemed porous. Some of the artists who got mentioned most never actually released music on the label. That included SOPHIE, who—despite working intimately with Cook and becoming a visionary and revered producer before an untimely death in 2021—never actually signed with him. Or reigning scene queen Charli XCX, who found a musical soulmate in Cook, a partnership which turbocharged her own pop and helped spark PC’s transition into the mainstream. Even now, PC Music’s orbit includes some of this generation’s most fearless artists, from Caroline Polachek—whose avant-garde pop is often co-produced by original label member Danny L Harle—to Christine and the Queens and oddball US hyperpop duo 100 gecs. Both back in the 2010s and now, there has been an endless stream of collaborations and remixes, which conjure the image of besties in a tight circle, and friends and affiliations spreading out for miles. Cook disseminating stems for his 7G project in 2020, so fans could make their own configurations of the songs, only accentuated the idea that you were part of PC Music, too. And like a great hip-hop collective (“Kane West” is Gus from Kero Kero Bonito? QT is Hayden Dunham from Hyd?), the sprawling nature of the label has always made it fun for listeners to follow, tag, Add to Playlist and generally follow into the corners of the internet where the pixels get too thick to see.

Part of the fun of seeing PC Music and its affiliates crack the mainstream was that it proved what fans had been claiming for years: This was something that ordinary people—or at least people who didn’t live entirely on the internet—might actually want to listen to. Take, for instance, Madonna’s 2015 track “Bitch I’m Madonna”, which was co-written by SOPHIE. Or Beyoncé’s “ALL UP IN YOUR MIND”—the jagged, pulsating track from 2022’s RENAISSANCE—which Cook co-created; Dua Lipa’s “Houdini” (co-written and co-produced by PC Music’s Harle); or the Mark Ronson-helmed Barbie soundtrack, which featured Charli XCX’s “Speed Drive”, produced by frequent collaborator and early PC label member EASYFUN. These are big names that need no introduction. And in reaching into the subcultural weirdness of PC Music’s world, they weren’t just participating in the balancing act between the fresh and the familiar behind all great pop music, they were bringing some of that world into the mainstream. Of course, the parts of PC Music that made them compelling—that edginess, that muchness—were also the parts that felt like they’d only appeal to devoted listeners, at least without being toned down a little.

It came as something of a surprise when news broke earlier this year that the PC Music label would cease releasing new music at the end of 2023. Shuttering your label just as its sound has been absorbed into the mainstream is a typically churlish move from Cook, a label boss who’s always had his tongue firmly in his cheek. But in many ways, it also makes sense: The kind of pop that PC Music ushered in is perhaps too big now to be contained by a single label. Last year, for example, Sam Smith and Kim Petras delivered arguably the first mainstream hyperpop smash in the form of “Unholy”, while the genre is being embraced—and carried forward—by a new generation who wear their reverence for PC Music on their sleeves. There’s feted London duo Jockstrap, who have cited PC Music’s Kane West as a key influence, their stylistically voracious, meticulously crafted alt-pop evidently shaped by the collective’s sound. Or PinkPantheress, who teamed up with Harle on her debut, Heaven knows—a collection of bubbly, emo-infused hyperpop with vocals so sweet they didn’t even need to be pitched up. As for Cook? He’s just released Soft Rock, the debut album of his project Thy Slaughter with EASYFUN, which features collaborations with Wolf Alice’s Ellie Rowsell, Caroline Polachek and Charli XCX. Link-ups with fellow pop pioneers and an ironic album title? PC Music may have changed pop forever, but some things about PC Music never change. Or, as they put it in a statement announcing the label’s closure online, “Personal Computer Music forever.”